As a child, Kristen Loesch fantasized that Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the 1918 massacre of the Romanovs and then met and fell in love with Loesch's great-grandfather.
Loesch's keen imagination carries over into "The Last Russian Doll," a richly detailed first novel that blends passion and romance with the history of Russia from the time of the Russian Revolution, through the Soviet era and into the turbulent early days of perestroika and glasnost. All this Russian history is woven through the lives of three entrancing female characters who embody the spirit and courageous determination of Russia's women.
History may be the novel's scaffolding, but Russian folk and fairy tales are its bedrock. Rather than rely on the centuries-old tales that have been passed down for generations, Loesch, for the purposes of this novel, creates her own. In them she hides clues to the family mysteries consuming Oxford student Rosie White, who in 1991 returns to Russia to investigate the life of her recently deceased mother, the enigmatic Katya.
Rosie and her mother fled to the United Kingdom after Rosie's father and sister were murdered 10 years before. She wants to learn the motive for the killings, something her mother refused to share. As she investigates, she also unearths the story of her grandparents, Valentin, a firebrand Bolshevik, and Antonina, a noblewoman and writer, who struggled through and survived the dark days of the early 20th century's Russian revolution. Digging up the past isn't easy and Rosie soon realizes that people who knew her family are not who they say they are.
Loesch, who has a master's degree in Slavonic studies from the University of Cambridge, writes in an author's note that her novel was inspired by epic Russian novels such as Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." And though she doesn't mention it, I couldn't help but be reminded of the powerful love story that is at the center of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" as Tonya and Valentin fight to sustain their love in the shadow of a totalitarian regime. Their story shines, more than Rosie's and Katya's, as it takes readers deep into the siege of Leningrad, the rise of Stalin and the deplorable Soviet labor camps.
Like the iconic Matryoshka dolls that are an intrinsic part of Russian culture, the stories of Antonina, Katya and Rosie — grandmothers, mothers and daughters — fit one inside the other. Together, in this provocative tale, they give us a better understanding of Russian culture, politics, and most of all, its people.
Carol Memmott is a writer in Austin, Texas.
The Last Russian Doll
By: Kristen Loesch.
Publisher: Berkley, 416 pages, $27.
